"The Green Inferno" Review

On September 17th, Stephen King tweeted a review of Eli Roth's new cannibal flick, The Green Inferno, praising it as a "glorious throwback to the drive-in movies of my youth." I find the endorsement from the Creepshow writer fitting, as The Green Inferno feels like it belongs right at home with any one of Creepshow's segments, inspired by horror comics and B-movies from the '50s. Blood's used a little more liberally now - I don't think an Ohio drive-in of the time would ever show an audience what happens when you try to catch a log traveling 50 miles an hour with your teeth - but The Green Inferno hearkens back to an era of pulp fiction: simple balls-to-the-wall entertainment sprinkled with political consciousness.

Roth, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, described the movie as his take on social media activism, pointing out opposite extremes: 

"And I saw a lot of people just reacting to things on social media. These social justice warriors. ‘This is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong.’ And they’re just tweeting and retweeting. They’re not actually doing anything. Or you see people get involved in a cause that they don’t really know a lot about and they go crazy about it. I wanted to make a movie about kids like that...who don’t really know what they’re getting into."

Justine (Lorenza Izzo) is Roth's innocent, an idealistic college student (that phrase feels redundant) who becomes interested in her campus' activist group, much to the chagrin of her dead-eyed, deadpan roommate (Sky Ferriera). Justine butts heads with the group's tree-hug-or-die leader, Alejandro (Ariel Levy), who mistakes her enthusiasm for "freshman" naivete. Nonetheless, he challenges her to join the group on a trip to Peru, where they'll protest the bulldozing of the Amazon rain forest and destruction of native tribal lands. The group arrives and sets up an elaborate PR stunt, which has just the right effect. Twitter blows up, world leaders chastise the company, and the bulldozing ceases. The team celebrates on their plane ride back home, but an engine fails and the plane crash-lands in the jungle, close to the natives' village. Little do the students know the natives are cannibals...

And you'll probably be able to figure out the rest from there. The movie takes quite a while to get started; the students arrive in the jungle at the halfway point, and before that, we're subjected to all the caricatured viewpoints of environmental activism. Roth sets up a few good points: Justine's dad (Richard Burgi), a UN attorney, notes, "we can't just go invade a country because they're doing something which we think is immoral"; Justine's whim to leave for Peru without any thought is chastised by her roommate. However, when the spears start flying and limbs start tearing off, the impact from social commentary is nigh-forgotten.

So if we're to drop any political pretense, how does the film fare? For one thing, the makeup effects are stunning. Greg Nicotero (Evil Dead II, From Dusk Till Dawn) leads the effects and they're just right: eye-popping, grotesque, unforgettable. The first time we see the Bald Headhunter (Ramón Llao), his yellow facepaint, tusks across the face, it is terrifying, an image so strong, it's used for most of the promotional material. The film features models, dummies, and camera tricks that pull off the harshest scenes well. It's an ode to good ol' '80s practical effects...which makes the CGI that much more frustrating.

When the movie uses CGI, it's stark, and contrasts violently with the practical. For some shots, like a plane falling out of the sky, I can understand the use, but for ants? Really? I bring up Creepshow again, where director George Romero used thousands of live roaches, having his team collect them by going to a cave, scooping a hole in bat guano, shutting off the lights and waiting for the swarm. The effect is chilling, one of the nastiest effects in horror history, released in 1982. In 2015, ants are computer-generated, and man, does it look fake.

In typical Eli Roth fashion, the horror is approached with a healthy degree of slapstick, and while the jokes feel sophomoric, by this point in the movie, I'm in a sophomoric mood. A scene with a "sick" girl in a cage leaves me giggling like a ten-year-old. Does my adult brain scold me for laughing? A little. But do I really care? Absolutely not. The characters, sans Justine, are crass, vulgar idiots, and though most of them don't deserve my hate (a disturbing trend I've discovered in recent horror - I'm looking at you, Unfriended), I don't find myself doling out any sympathy, so when they make stupid moves, I bust out laughing when they get their comeuppance. If Darwin's laughing, so am I.

The Green Inferno is a step above much of 2015's horror, and while I feel it would've been even more effective as a shortened section of an anthology, I have little complaints that actually affected my enjoyment. I've gone to scary movies this year hoping to lose my brain for an hour and a half, see some creepy imagery, and laugh at the ridiculous, and The Green Inferno is exactly what I hoped. It's an ultraviolent, gore-drenched cartoon, and for fans of horror comedies, you'll dig it. Bring your friends, sneak in a steak (cooked rare, of course), and have a blast.

Thank you all for reading; I'm the Man Without a Plan, signing off.